Traffic, traffic, traffic, the lifeblood of any business - and don’t you forget it.. 

If Walmart didn’t have traffic, no matter how low their prices were, they would not sell anything.  The same goes for your business, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, it doesn’t matter how great your sales letter is, it doesn’t matter how good your deal is, with out traffic your sales will be zero… The question is, then, what is the best traffic building method? 

Which traffic strategy should you use? Should you use article marketing? Should you use Pay Per Click advertising?  Should you use link exchanges?  Should you uses search engine optimization? Should you use an affiliate program? Should you take advantage of social networking and social bookmarking sites? 

The answer is all of the above and more. 

You should never depend on only one strategy for obtaining traffic for a number of reasons.  The biggest of those reasons is that the conditions under which a traffic generation method you are using could change in an instant, rendering that traffic method obsolete. 

For example, in the past, internet marketers used Google adwords, a form of pay per click advertising, to send prospects to a squeeze page so the marketer could collect their name and email.  After a while, Google no longer allowed adwords campaigns to link to a plain squeeze page without any other content.  If you had used this method as your sole traffic producing mechanism, your traffic was immediately shut down by Google.  Now you have no traffic.  That is the danger of only using one traffic building method.  It could conceivably disappear at any moment.

Another example is a traffic method that many had used called trading links.  It consisted of Webmasters trading links with other Webmasters.  Each would link to the other.  This was fine for a time and the search engines provided higher results for your site because of the extra links.  Higher rank meant higher traffic.  But then, as with most strategies, some marketers decided to try and take advantage of this. 

Soon many websites had hundreds of links to sites that had absolutely nothing to do with their niche or their product. Once again, Google caught on and instead of rewarding these kinds of links, Google started penalizing these links.  Instead of helping your Google rank it actually hurt it.  Lower rank meant lower traffic.  Again, one small change in Google and your traffic could come to a screeching halt.

Investment advisors always stress diversification of financial portfolios to protect their investors.  The same logic is good advice for your traffic generating methods.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Keep your traffic methods varied to protect yourself.  If Google makes a dramatic change, it will have minimal impact on your traffic if you have multiple streams of traffic.  You will be way ahead of your competitor, who may loose all of his traffic when the rules change.